


Try Again

by raxilia_running



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 14:54:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2656133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raxilia_running/pseuds/raxilia_running
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>#1: <i>If Aoba had to define him somehow, he’d say that Noiz is like a puzzle, one of those reproductions of a ukiyo-e work, made of imperceptible shades and light brushes, a misty – or rather snow-clad – mountain landscape.</i><br/>#2: <i>Feeling pain, now that he isn’t imprisoned in his resistant and dull cocoon anymore, shows itself at two completely different levels, according to how his body or his mind is being stricken.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dread in the heart

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Try Again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8247104) by [raxilia_running](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raxilia_running/pseuds/raxilia_running). 



> This fic was written after I completed Noiz's route in DMMD. I was totally moved by Noiz and his relationship with Aoba and I had two prompt (two italian statements, originally), so I decided to use them! This first chapter was born in my mind as a consideration about puzzles and the rest followed quite naturally. The prompt I used was: «It was a strange sorrow, dying of nostalgia for a life he’d never lived» a sentence originally written by Alessandro Baricco, an Italian writer. The painting Aoba thinks about is [Evening snow on Mount Hira](http://uploads6.wikiart.org/images/hiroshige/evening-snow-on-mount-hira.jpg) by Hiroshige.  
> As always, I have to thank greatly [terryh_nyan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/terryh_nyan/profile). Without her, this fic wouldn't have a so perfect grammar. Thank you, my wonderful beta! Q3Q♥

_There's a God-awful shitty feeling of dread in my heart. Yeah, it's got a lot to do with haven't finished what I started_  
 _**[Dread in my heart | Mother Mother]** _

Noiz is a puzzle.

If Aoba had to define him somehow, he’d say that Noiz is like a puzzle, one of those reproductions of a ukiyo-e work, made of imperceptible shades and light brushes, a misty – or rather snow-clad – mountain landscape. In his case, there has never been a box with a template to rely on. Aoba has always had to fumble, fitting pieces by chance; bewildered by the excessive whiteness and the shades, so vague that one has to examine them between their fingers again and again, before they can fit them all in a coherent drawing. Noiz isn’t a puzzle per se; Aoba would say that dealing with Noiz, for him, meant trying to retrace a broken painting, with haphazardly tossed pieces, some chipped, some nabbed again thanks to his long view, a moment before losing them on the floor.

Aoba thought he had solved the riddle. After looking at everything hidden in Noiz’s mind, after knowing the dark and square world in which he had shut himself, after breaking the thin but tough diaphragm that detached him from the outside world, Aoba convinced himself that he understood.

He’d barely rebuilt the external frame, defining every angle, and finally had distinct clues on how to proceed toward the inside in order to give a shape to the cold and defaced landscape that Noiz was.

What would be needed would be the routine, a slow job of constant contacts and patient listening of his silences, even before his words, to complete the work.

Aoba had only savored a pale and beautiful shred of it during the long time Noiz was hospitalized. It seemed to him like the tempting prelude of everything that would have followed: the return to normality; with it, other tiles would have aligned and many new things about Noiz would have bobbed up.

Had he deceived himself? Maybe. Had he gotten everything wrong? Surely.

He’d fooled himself, he’d thought he had gotten a glimpse of some signals in Noiz’s mind and heart, that maybe bore no correspondence with reality.

He was sure he had overestimated his role in Noiz’s life. That’s why he was missed.

Aoba had been nothing more than a medium, his jumper wire to the outer world. That’s what he repeated to himself, while he proceeded to reshape the sorrow of absence in the unperturbed flow of his everyday life.

He hadn’t been able to complete that puzzle in time, too many scattered tiles remained and he hadn’t had the opportunity to fit them together in their respective jagged sides.

Aoba found himself nostalgic. He started, in spite of himself, to imagine how his life would have been like, if Noiz hadn’t left Midorijima. Entire days made of discovering, being his guide in a still new and apparently obscure world, pushing him through a life of feelings, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant as sandpaper on the skin. He had imagined never-ending quarrels, Rhyme challenges day in day out, letting Noiz try all of those foods he had never tasted, smiling softly about his ill-concealed bewilderment in front of the realization that real world could be really beautiful.

All of that would never be for many reasons, that went beyond his inability of understanding him, and resulted in Noiz’s right to know the world all by himself – or even with someone else.

Aoba ended up regretting a future he would have never had but in his mind _. It was a strange sorrow, dying of nostalgia for a life he’d never lived._ It was a discomfort stuck in between his ribs, in the exact point in where his heart and his stomach touched themselves. It was a sorrow that, nevertheless, he wished Noiz would never learn to feel. That wasn’t what Aoba would have wanted to show him, when he had decided to bring him back to the real world.

Noiz is a puzzle and Aoba feels selfish but everything he wishes for, trapped behind his Heibon stall, is to have him back under his fingers to recompose the landscape he was never allowed to finish.


	2. You'll be the rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Physical pain is a good touchstone for other types of pain, that can’t be mended with some sterile wire and enough sticky patch, and, if left to decant, would suppurate and make every tissue gangrenous, even worse than a physical, exposed injury._  
>  Noiz is alone in his office and thinking about Aoba is only natural.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Having written the previous chapter, it seemed only fair of writing about Noiz's POV, too. I was inspired by the bad ending, to be honest. I found frightening but interesting the fact that Noiz, in that ending, longed for Aoba so bad and how unhealthy and dangerous for both of them this was. So I tried to explore Noiz's reasons for leaving Midorijima more deeply and this second chapter was born. The prompt I used was: «The only, the biggest desire of his restless heart is to endlessly possess Aoba or to be able to dunk him, when the time of absence comes, in a sleep without dreams that cannot end» from a documentary about serial killers. As always, lot of thanks to my wonderful beta, [terryh_nyan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/terryh_nyan/profile)~

_I make a mess and you'll be there to help me undress. I'll be unclean, I'll be obscene, you'll be the rest and if you leave me, rest assured it would kill me_  
 _**[Oleander | Mother Mother]** _

Feeling pain, feeling _real pain_ , isn’t as he would have imagined it. Feeling pain, in the world outside Rhyme, is a simpler and more complex matter than it seems at first glance. Feeling pain, now that he isn’t imprisoned in his resistant and dull cocoon anymore, shows itself at two completely different levels, according to how his body or his mind is being stricken.

For instance: he was there, sitting at his beautiful, big as a billiard table, mahogany desk – he is so used to it, he even considers it small – when he started to realign the papers of a long contract – full of notes and boring quibbles.

In the span of a moment, a small cut opens his thumb’s tender flesh.

It hurts. In nineteen years of his life he has earned hundreds and hundreds of wounds. Since he has started to feel again, he has suffered worse shocks on his body but every new pain is always at the same time both a disgusting and a pleasurable discovery that even he can feel the same feelings every human being around him experiences.

Physical pain is annoying. That’s the first adjective which pops in his mind and it’s the most fitting, in his opinion. Physical pain is a limiting inconvenience, it brings along the fear of a feeling that, after all, he doesn’t want to experiment and his mind starts to settle accordingly, wavering in a way that doesn’t belong to him. It isn’t the time to plunge into a brawl anymore, ignoring unbearable bruises that a well-delivered punch against the nose or the neck can cause. He can’t wake up anymore and wander at home, catching furniture edges in the hip and wondering how those purple hematomas appeared. He can’t bandage his hands and let injuries and compound fractures heal by themselves unnaturally anymore, keeping on pressing keys as if his body were perfectly functioning.

Physical pain, though, is a necessary step, not for that bullshit about the self-preservation of his flesh shell – it still seems strange, worrying about his own safety. Nor does he care about the fact that pain is the other side of pleasure and all of those stimulating feelings that suddenly make the world more colorful.

Physical pain is a good touchstone for other types of pain, that can’t be mended with some sterile wire and enough sticky patch, and, if left to decant, would suppurate and make every tissue gangrenous, even worse than a physical, exposed injury.

Now he can understand that “like a suckerpunch” is a silly but suitable common way of describing a breath-taking feeling that smashes his heart, when a disappointment suddenly strikes him, when the ache becomes too strong, when the loneliness isn’t a choice anymore but an imposition. Now he know that even the muddy and nauseating sea in which he has floated for a long time during his life, basking in self-hatred and resentment against his inability of being normal, was a type of pain, too thin to be recognizable.

If someone asked him now and he felt like answering, he’d say that what he’s experimenting is similar to the sense of having broken ankles and wrists, because missing someone is a rogue that snaps his back and restricts his movements more than the time he was hospitalized.

The problem is that Noiz is selfish and possessive, as only a lonely child without love can be.

The problem is that Noiz has never known what caring and human warmth aimed at him and him alone were, because even the first people that should have offered them to him hadn’t been able to do it.

The problem is that Noiz wants Aoba all for himself, not out of gratitude, but because he was the right person at the right moment. He doesn’t know with which other words explain it but Aoba hasn’t only been the first human being that has cared for him and forced him to open up his heart. He was the only one that could have done it, in a way that only partially has to do with his powers. He doesn’t desire anything else, in his new life full of new feelings and people: nor social status, nor money, nor fun. _The only, the biggest desire of his restless heart is to endlessly possess Aoba or to be able to dunk him, when the time of absence comes, in a sleep without dreams that cannot end._ It’s a desire so visceral that it scares him and not because the idea of an obsessive symbiosis grosses him out but because he knows he’d make Aoba suffer.

He understood that remaining in Midorijima would have meant risking to worsen, to destruction, the feeling that ties him to Aoba, the delicate and faint connection that Aoba has weaved together between them with obstinate care and that could be the sprout of a normal relationship among two people in love. He would have had him all and only for himself, holding desperately on to his arm as the lonely and selfish child he still was.

There’s a thing he has always known with blatant certainty, from the moment he was saved, and it is that he has to earn him, just like Aoba has earned his trust and his love, fighting stubbornly until he has proven that the world could be more than a fruitless sequence of favor exchanging.

He has to grow up and take charge and it’s something Aoba can’t help him with. It’s a personal path that he has willingly decided to deal with alone.

The point is that feeling pain it’s a simpler and more complex matter than he had ever imagined. That ache, stinging as paper snick in the flesh, that breaks his heart every time he measures the distance between him and Aoba, doesn’t belong only to him but there are many things Noiz still has to learn.

Because pain can be a powerful and permeating feeling: like a punch too strong that injuries who packs it and who endures it, the loneliness that grips him is devouring Aoba too, but he ignores this fact.

This will be the first thing he’s going to ask him, when he sees him again and can finally be worthy of demanding his company, without having any more matters to settle with his past.


End file.
